This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

Demanding Justice and protection from the Police and CPS

Below is our letter to MPs. Please write ASAP to your MP and other MPs you may have a relationship with, to urge them to delete or amend the worst aspects of this Bill. While families are impoverished under austerity cuts, children are increasingly being removed rather than mothers given protection, resources and support to enable their children to stay with them. You can use some of our points if you want to, or write your own.

There is increasing opposition to this Bill, please urge your MP to also sign Early Day Motion 626 Children’s Social Care against the privatisation of child services.

Please send us a copy of any letters you write.
Nicola Mann
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Dear MP

Re: Children and Social Work Bill - second reading in the House of Commons, 5 December

Women Against Rape was at the meeting in parliament in March 2015 called by Compassion In Care to get support for Edna's Law as a way of protecting people who 'blow the whistle' and are victimised as a result.

We all spoke briefly about our personal experiences of being a whistleblower. We then had a general discussion about what could be done to protect people who report abuse, to ensure that they kept their jobs and that the abuses they were reporting were investigated properly by the relevant authorities.

At no point that we are aware of before, during or at the end of the meeting did anyone ask John McDonnell to get involved in their individual case. Many people described their own cases on which they were working, including Ms Cameron-Blair. As is clear from the audio recording, she, like the rest of us, addressed her comments to the whole meeting; it was not a one to one conversation with Mr McDonnell.

We welcome the proposals by Attorney General to look again at Section 41, and at judges’ training and instruction to juries.

Women Against Rape has campaigned on this issue for many years, to get the law changed so that a woman’s sexual history with men other than the defendant is disallowed. But when the law was introduced in 1999 it did not make that distinction. Section 41 left a number of openings for barristers to continue to raise her sexual history.

We don’t know how often this particular clause in Section 41 is being used – only this one has been publicised. The Ched Evans case has had wide publicity because he is a celebrity footballer and has wealth and social power. We suspect this influenced the decision to allow this woman’s sexual history to be raised.

Back by popular demand – on the 40th anniversary of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) and Women Against Rape (WAR) invite you to a second showing of this exciting play:

PURSUING JUSTICE – sex workers take their rapist to court

A tense courtroom drama based on the original transcript of the landmark rape trial backed by our two organisations after the authorities refused to prosecute (leaflet below). Followed by Q&A with one of the victims, the ECP and WAR, and the playwright/director and cast who donated their time and creative skills to present this play.